There’s this game that my ex-girlfriend Melissa and I used to play back when we were teenagers at Hartford High. It was a pretty simple parking lot game, and it usually started with the two of us sitting down cross-legged inside one of the parking squares and looking at each other in the eye. Weed may or may not have been involved during these encounters. If it was then we would almost certainly have spent the previous half-hour rolling joints and doing something we used to call ‘shotgunning,’ though I can’t ever remember where the term stemmed from or even if it’s what people call the activity—basically one person, usually me, would inhale from a joint and then press my mouth against hers and she would suck the smoke in, jointly getting high from the fumes as well. Since this involved kissing it was primarily a male-and-female game, and in fact I can’t ever remember playing it with anyone except Melissa. More than something romantic it was also a practical arrangement since she was a pretty lightweight smoker and second-hand inhalation proved a lot better for her than having her own, full joint, a quantity which could often send her into a paranoid spiral. I wasn’t actually all that much into pot myself. The only thing it did was make me lose track of time and give me some amount of physical relief since I was always so tired due to lack of sleep and a pretty strict running schedule—I ran 800m for state until I blew out my knee senior year. People always like to think that was some sort of tragedy, but I was never good enough to be an Olympian, or anything, and I’d like to think that I was secretly done a favor by the big man up there.
The game was pretty simple, being as it was the exact kind of game your teenage girlfriend would force upon you as one of a variety of womanly whims that were meant to unsettle and gain affection via some kind of gotcha. It was not dissimilar to the ‘would you love me if I was a worm’ series of questions, which had a propensity to get syntactically and morally complex until they bordered on absurdity: of course part of what I liked about my girlfriend was that she was decidedly not a worm, and if she suddenly turned into a worm I would be quite unhappy with the event, but I wasn’t stupid, I was always happy to give the ritual ‘of course, babe’ as response even as I internally found it preposterous. There used to be this guy Patrick who played guitar for this Arctic Monkeys cover band that was briefly popular in school who once privately told me that in his case the answer to the worm question was ‘of course’ not out of a brave, chivalric perspective of rightness but rather because he thought he actually would love his girlfriend—this sultry brunette called Eileen—even if she was a worm, but then Eileen wasn’t even the type to ask that question anyway. I suspect that those things had a correlation with each other. Melissa, on the other hand, was a big ‘would you love me if I were a worm’ girl, and after my customary answer it would usually be escalated to ‘would you love me if I were a bacterium’ to which I had to say ‘you would be my bacterium, babe’ and then try to end the line of questioning by putting my arm around her and playing with her nose with a single finger, maybe touch her butt, or brush my mouth against her in just the sharpest hint of a kiss that would get her to blush and smirk; all very classical mod- or greaser-like behaviors that she very much appreciated and which made me feel both dignified and kind of foolish. On occasion this would prompt ‘would you love me if I were in a wheelchair,’ to which my truthful answer was ‘I’m not sure because I don’t know if we’d be able to have sex, then, and I’m not yet familiar enough with myself to know if I could live a sexless life’ (the answer turned out to be decidedly not) but the answer I’d actually give was ‘I’d wheel you wherever you wanted,’ to which she’d say ‘what if I were fat’ and I’d respond with the (false) ‘obviously, that’s not even a question at this point.’ Most of the time this game would end here unless Melissa was high, in which case she’d ask me ‘do you love me now,’ and my answer was ‘I’m going to love you until I die,’ which I knew even then was false, but I said it anyway because that’s what you’re supposed to say, and this always pleased her to no end. I’m not actually sure what was going on in that head of hers because it was quite certain to me, at least, and to most around us and almost certainly even her that the chances that I would love her for another year or that I even loved her then were prohibitively unclear, but somehow she just liked hearing me say it. That was pretty much always the end of the game, and then shortly after we would proceed to the kind of game I liked decidedly more.
But this was not the game we would play in the parking lot. The parking lot game was less ritualistic but also consequently had much higher stakes. It was, briefly, as follows: Melissa would ask me a series of questions, and I was supposed to answer all but one of them completely truthfully. Usually there were three options and I could pick whichever two I wanted. The first time we played it I saw right through the charade and understood that I was supposed to volunteer all three truthful answers, in fact, because the non-answer was in itself an answer as to a question that was not to be breached, and hence would form a misgiving in her mind. I do think I am accidentally selling Melissa a bit short here, because she was generally an intelligent and confident girl and these misgivings would only privately manifest—certainly she wouldn’t attempt to cause a scene or anything—but were nevertheless the kind of thing that needed reassurance. I do recall her being distinctly more heavyset in the lower grades and having only discovered post-puberty that she was actually rather good-looking indeed; hence there were certain core beliefs at play here which I was supposed to alleviate. For example the first time we had sex she asked me not to look at her even though she was quite a knockout, and it was only the fourth or fifth time that she gained enough confidence that we were actually able to do it in a reasonable sense. I do believe this was generally a good experience for her. I, on the other hand, did not have much on my mind in the way of rational thought during these encounters, and so my recollection of them is quite threadbare, though I remember driving out in a leather jacket and buying myself a soda shortly after the first time, feeling like the streets had been designed for me and me alone. However it turned out that Melissa would get frustrated if I didn’t play the game as intended, so I restrained myself to only answering the two questions I felt she really wanted answered.
The last time we played this game was in October of my junior year, about one year into our relationship. Following this the course of our relationship turned downhill, although whether this had to do with the game I do not know. By February Melissa and I were no longer together in any formal sense, and both of us were mature enough to not continue to see each other in any informal sense, either—she took it somewhat harder than I did, in general, seeing as to how she took sick leave and failed to attend school for the next couple weeks afterward, while I mostly drowned it away through partying and large amounts of pot (which had become quite easy to come by in Connecticut around that time). By June I had started dating this girl Daria, but there was something about her that was so disagreeable to me that after we finally broke up in September I no longer had the stomach to go out at all and for several years forth my bedtime memories remained those of Melissa and our parking lot game.
The memory is as follows: she is looking at me with a glint in her eye which is adorned with large amounts of eyeshadow and a flourish of winged eyeliner and I start thinking very much of Lou Reed’s Pale Blue Eyes despite the fact that her eyes are brown, not blue, and she has a little tight-lipped smile that signals that whatever is coming next is going to really knock me out of the park. She also has that characteristic ditziness that stems from having taken pot when one is not ordinarily supposed to be the kind of girl who takes pot—Melissa was a straight-A student, and ended up at UPenn instead of UConn like the rest of us. She reaches out and takes my hand into hers. I am feeling confused and disoriented, like I usually did in these sessions, and I’m certain it reflects on my face. I want to kiss her but then I always have this latent desire to kiss her so I shove it down for a bit; she takes these things very seriously. She then blinks a few times, and in this memory she has a genetic mutation that has somehow given her double the regular amount of eyelashes, leading to a very sensual effect. In particular these were circumstances under which I would find it very difficult to lie to her even if we were not playing this game. There are no cars around except for a 1993 Ford Aspire parked around the corner in the part of the parking lot that technically belongs to the school but also doubles as an unofficial parking lot for the nearby CVS; the bespectacled young man who drove it here is actually within that CVS right now, and for some reason in the memory I always imagine him to be refilling his stock of Adderall, though he’s almost certainly just getting condoms or something—he’s wearing Doc Martens. The car’s also got a hazy blue bumper sticker that I can’t make out from here. In any case, there is no one looking at us, and when I turn back to Melissa it feels strange and eerie that the only two observers we’ve got right now are each other, which is a perfectly normal situation indoors but quite liminal in our current environment. It feels vaguely illegal.
Melissa then opens her mouth—I notice that she has a deep red lipstick on—and says that she is going to ask me three questions, of which I can answer any two truthfully, and leave the third one unanswered. These are the questions: ‘Would you hit me if I asked you to,’ ‘Do you think I still look beautiful even if I turn to the side,’ and ‘Would you be unhappy if I broke up with you right now.’
When this actually happened that October I was rather alarmed by the final question and my immediate desire was to ask whether she was indeed breaking up with me. Nonetheless I swallowed down my misgivings.
‘I’ll play the game,’ I said, ‘but you’ve gotta tell me why you’re asking me these.’
This was a change—previously I’d never conditioned my answers on such justification. She was a bit surprised but it seemed to have more to do with my straightforwardness. ‘Alright,’ she said.
I told her the truth—that I’d be very unhappy indeed if she broke up with me at that moment, because despite everything I did like her very much, and that I thought she absolutely did look stunning even from the side. All in all it was quite a strange set of questions, but I could tell from the look on her face that I had given her exactly the wrong answers. For a while she said nothing.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked.
‘I’m fine,’ she said. Then—‘can I tell you something?’
‘Of course.’
‘Promise me you won’t think bad of me.’
‘Of course not, babe. You know I wouldn’t.’
She sniffed, and there was yet another pause. ‘What would you think if I told you I’d always want to be injured.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Like if I’d always wanted to be terribly injured. Like maybe hit by a car, or something.’
‘You want to be hit by a car?’
‘Not exactly a car, particularly. It’s not like putting your hand on a hot coal or anything—I know it burns, and it hurts me, obviously. I don’t want to die, either, obviously, that would be horrible, I’m not depressed. Like I don’t want to be cut by a knife or anything. Those things hurt. But I mean like injured. Like brutally mauled. Do you get it?’
‘I—I’m not sure I understand. Are you okay, babe? Maybe it’s the weed—’
‘It’s not the weed,’ she said, shaking her head.
‘I know people sometimes spank each other, I don’t know.’
She shook her head again. ‘No, it’s not sexual. I don’t get off on it. It doesn’t, like, make me horny or anything. I want you to punch me again and again and again. Until I break my bones. Would you do that for me?’
‘Wha—what? Are you serious?’
‘Yes.’
‘But—what?’
‘Do you ever go out for a run? Like, in the sun? And then when you’re back you drink a cold glass of water and all of a sudden you feel great, like this sense of relief? Have you ever felt that?’
‘Sure.’
‘It’s like that. I just want to be injured. I just want to be torn to shreds. I don’t know why. I’ve always wanted it.’
‘You’re kidding,’ I said, smiling, but the look on her face became even less confident.
‘Can you do that for me?’
‘I—you want me to hit you? Again and again?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Melissa, I—I don’t know what to say.’
‘If you loved me you’d do this for me.’
This was a gunshot—it certainly seemed logical to me that if I truly loved her I would want to do that for her, but something about this whole conversation transcended logic, anyway, so I continued. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I love you but I don’t think I’d do that.’
‘Why not?’ she pleaded.
‘I—I don’t know, I don’t want to hurt you. I can’t do that. Are you sure you’re okay?’
‘I’m okay,’ she sighed, then smiled again. ‘Come here,’ she said, putting her hand on my cheek, and a short while later we ended back in my car. I decided to put our conversation out of mind.
I do not recall us having any immediate problems, but over the next few weeks it became clear that I had somehow erred during this conversation and not given her the response she wanted—although I am quite certain that she herself did not have much in the way of an answer to the question of response she wanted. She never mentioned this desire to be injured to me again, either, but then she stopped mentioning a lot of things to me altogether. When we did break up it was after a teary series of encounters. In fact it was not clear to me at all why we were breaking up beyond some meagre comments on us ‘not feeling the same way’ anymore, but then I personally felt the same way about Melissa as I always had—incredible physical desire and a strong feeling of affection that could potentially border on love at times. I did not think it unlikely at all that given more time I would cross over to the other side completely. On the other hand, she did not give me more than crumbs, and the little I could piece together from her friends was that she did not seem to be doing particularly well in general. Something about that conversation had been a breaking point for her. I guess I was different from her, in that sense—none of the questions I ever asked her had answers that I could possibly construe as incorrect, and while it gave me the willies to to think about her smashing her body with a hammer it was about as important a detail about her as the fact that she had brown eyes instead of blue, for instance. It all came down to a leap of faith. Maybe her fault was taking me at my word. Maybe I could have been persuaded to break all her bones, who knows. She never once believed me that I’d love her even if she was a worm, but it didn’t take her any time at all to believe that I didn’t want to hit her. Evidently she had decided that it was not going to work out between us, whatever that meant. But then did she ever once think that maybe it could work out all along? That maybe we could make it work if we tried? She seemed to have no qualms about looking for reasons to leave—but did she ever look for a reason to stay? Sure, things worked out all right in the end, but isn’t it nice to think that they could have really been something?